Why Gwyneth Paltrow Thinks Taylor Swift Is the Perfect Role Model

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Carita Rizzo

Oct 10, 2015 @ 2:00 pm

It may have been Gwyneth Paltrow's time to shine at the Variety Power of Women luncheon yesterday, but she was giving another star a shout-out. As it turns out, Paltrow's daughter Apple looks up especially to Taylor Swift and the actress isn't complaining at all.

Clad in a Brandon Maxwell sleek getup, Paltrow had this to say of the pop star: "Taylor is a girl who's incredibly talented. She writes her own music. She's not naked on the red carpet. She's an incredibly astute business woman, so with role models like that, she [Apple] can't go wrong."

Later, on stage Paltrow talked about her own ambition in Hollywood and how it was tempered by the expectations of society. "When I was a young woman in Hollywood, if you were a woman focused on building your career, you were labeled, 'ambitious,' and it was a bad word. It was said with disgust," she said. "So I was decidedly not. And adopted a kind of an, 'Ooh, how did this happen to me?' approach. I believed that wanting my success was somehow a bad thing. I was told to temper my use of S.A.T. words in interviews because it made me unlikable. Today, however, the power of women rings a bit differently."

In that spirit, Paltrow was joined at the event by fellow honorees like Anna Kendrick who spoke out on LGBT issues and Oprah who recounted an incredibly touching story of her best Christmas ever, which happened when she was just 12. The family was on welfare and they had thought there would be no Christmas that year. "My first thought, after being embarrassed and ashamed was what will my story be? What am I going to tell everybody when we go back to school and they’re showing their toys and I don’t have anything to talk about?" Oprah said onstage at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. "Well, late that night some nuns showed up at our house and brought a basket of food and they brought toys for my brother and my sister. I was overwhelmed with joy that those nuns showed up, not because they brought me a Tammy Doll when I really wanted a Barbie Doll. I was overwhelmed because somebody remembered that we existed and somebody cared enough in the middle of the night to come to our house with food and toys."